This is a difficult review to write, as it was (and is) a difficult book to read. Clarel is a deeply flawed work of utter genius, one that simultaneously challenged, baffled, and inspired me. I read it during a difficult time, a time when more than once the phone rang with news about a loved one that we thought could be final. I do not advise it for such times; it is a dark book, a book filled with a sense of foreboding and a sense of despair. Indeed, I think one should only even think about reading this book if you have loved Moby Dick, and particularly the deeply philosophical elements of Moby Dick, and can somehow reconcile poetic tastes that incorporate both Longfellow and Pound.

I am one of those who often finds Melville side-splittingly funny, even if his humor is often excruciatingly dry amd sardonic, and more than occassionally downright cruel. And I began this book laughing at poor Clarel. But Clarel, a pitifiul, searching student not even seemingly aware of for what he searches, seems to gain more than a little grandness as he simply survives a few days with a crowd that embodies all of humanity, all of history, and all of religion, and each of whom, one by one, comes to a tragic end, tells a tragic tale, or displays a tragic fate. It does not take long before it ceases to be funny. Melville's deep but often rambunctious and inspiring philosophical dives of Moby Dick become sober and somber. He attempts in the very end to come up for a bit of air and light, but he has dived so deeply that the brief surfacing is unsatisfying and disorienting.

One may look at this veil of tears and wonder why one would choose to delve into it. In the mythological dispute between Homer and Hesiod, Hesiod asks Homer what the best fate is for a man, and Homer answers, to never be born or, if born, to quickly die. Melville embraces the Homeric spirit. But, just as Homer wrote some pretty good stuff despite the attitude, there is much to Clarel that is truly grand.

In Moby Dick, Melville invents the ultimate anti-hero in Ahab. Ahab is a man who may seem to be Satan incarnate, but more than once displays the side of the angel before (sometimes during) the fall. Ahab is an astonishingly large, powerful anti-hero. In Clarel, Melville gives us a mouse as an anti-hero; he plunges an annoyingly ordinary and meek boy man into the middle of this grand epic of searching, death, redemption, and tragedy. Clarel is a wimp, and yet he is on an Easter week odyssey in which he will witness many, many better men fail in ways that are often quite inglorious. Clarel will learn loss. He will learn pain. He will become almost nonchallant about suffering. He will retrace steps from the Gospel, survive endless references to Dante, Milton, Chaucer, and the Bible, puzzle through the greatest challenges of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, and come out the other end ready to plod through some more. This very ordinariness in the face of profundity and challenge is utter genius; it is as extraordinarily American as the later Willy Loman and as challenging a moment in literature as one finds. Indeed, this may be a more challenging construct than that presented a few years later, on June 16, 1904, when the walls of the Western narrative come crashing down. In many ways, here is Melville challenging and questioning his own Moby Dick, and I think Clarel is very much to be read as the counterpoint to Moby Dick.

Melville's ambition in Clarel is extraordinary. This is a work that potentially dwarfs the Illiad and Odyssey in scope (even if set in a mere few days), and the poetry often does include real gems. Melville's poetry has a cramped, twisted, imagistic style that anticipates much of what will come later. But that ambition overshoots what he actually accomplishes, and on more than one occassion Melville cannot scale the heights he has set before him, and slumps back to recite more despair. Clarel suffers from a leaden loss of humor by midstream, where it almost becomes unintentionally funny by being overly morose, and from stretches of poetry that clog up Melville's way, that sometimes become redundant or excessive, and that occassionally simply fall flat. Oddly, some of the most brilliant moments in the poetry are moments where the suffering is trivialized and the verse has an almost sing-songy quality.

I will keep reading Clarel, coming back to it to see what else I find. There is much here. But it is as difficult a book as I have attempted. ( )

In chamber low, and dank and wet,
Young Clarel sits alone and frets
About the things that make him vexed
(Primarily that he's undersexed
But also) fear that God is dead
A troubling prospect! which has led
Our Hero to the Holy Land
To fall in with a no-good band
Of pilgrims allegorical
Whose stories metaphorical
So far poor Clarel's brain confuse
That even at the risk he'll lose
The chance to do generic Ruth
(cipher that she is, forsooth)
He trips the light Chaucerian
With them--all seekers, to a man
Though some get insufficient shrift
And only those who lack the gift
Of simple joy, of heart unfurled
Have gravitas in Melville's world
Enough--to wit, they go a-walk
Which leads them (facile rhyme!) to talk
About their existential pain
And how believe in God again
And what a lovely grove or rill
As they tour fabled Israel.
The whole narrated by the salt
Who thought this poem would o'ervault
The stirring tales that made his name
Of cruel sea and White Whale's fame
And spent the bulk of thirty years
Pouring toil, sweat, and tears
Into this strange and fevered work
Of Christian, Hebrew, Druze and Turk
Who in sometimes cackhanded verse
(Though well I know my own is worse)
Explores the fears men feel a-night
And what is truth? and whence comes right?
With vivid personalities
Who yet remain nonentities
'Neath weight of all they symbolize
Humanity dries up and dies.
There's Rolfe, the one who's never wrong;
And Vine, too fey to interest long;
Nehemiah, blithe and silly;
Belex, brave, but (ha ha) killy;
Druze Djalea represents
The stolid, mystic Orient;
A crew of broken, haunted dicks,
Each of whom reliably picks
Every fight that he can find
To scatter phantoms of the mind:
Mortmain, Ungar, Margoth too
(The last not haunted, but--a Jew!
Which makes them all uncomfortable
As does his rationalism dull
Old Melville evidently feeling
Kosher 'tis that unappealing
Arguments are not refuted
But to th'unpleasant devoluted).
Anyway, we're meant to approve
These singleminded fellows, who
Perhaps a little pathos have
(At least Mortmain, in early grave,
But not so much the Southern tramp
Called Ungar, who receives the stamp
Of righteousness--though a poltroon:
A nihilistic Daniel Boone.
The one good man who states (who dares!)
That living's not cause for despair:
Priest Derwent, who (if you ask me)
Has strongest claim to sanity
Although his superficial heart
Makes Clarel think he's not that smart
He seems the only one, to me
Without perverse lividity
But hang it--Herman M. and I
Were not meant to see eye to eye.
I do like how he makes you ponder
Life, and how to live with honour
And if the choice for you and me
Mammon or Christ Jesus be
I like too that his characters yearn . . .


So! you'll be unsurprised to learn
That Clarel never gets the girl
And we live in a hopeless world.
In summary, I thought this book
Might well reward a second look
If only Melville's prejudice
Had not made it less hit than miss
And raving monomaniacs
The sympathies do sorely tax
On Clarel, then, my verdict full:
Not great, yet--not unbearable! ( )